Meta settles states' child-safety claims for $18B; Florida rejects deal as "peanuts"
Meta agreed to impose daily limits on children’s social media use and pay nearly $18 billion in settlements with nearly every US state today, cutting short a trial in which Meta said several of the states were demanding over $1.4 trillion. The settlement requires court approval. The settlement includes a default two-hour daily time limit that teens can only turn off with a parent’s permission, a default block between midnight and 6 am, and a school mode in which notifications are muted by default from 8 am to 3 pm. Teens will receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time on Facebook or Instagram, and prompts when their total daily usage hits 60 minutes and 90 minutes. The settlement also includes a ban on displaying numbers of likes or reactions to users under 18, a ban on cosmetic procedure image filters for users under 18, and an option for users under 18 to have a non-personalized feed. Meta must use age-verification systems to detect users under 18 and remove kids under 13, and will have to bring on an independent auditor with expansive access to information and resources. The settlement got praise from The Tech Oversight Project, which said state attorneys general “dragged Meta into court and forced it to protect our kids,” but added that Congress should pass a law to enforce protections on all platforms permanently. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier rejected the multi-state settlement, writing on X that “the payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta’s profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids, and a slap on the wrist for a trillion-dollar corp that’ll pay more to lawyers than to the states. We’ll see them at trial.”
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